Lasting Imprint of ‘Last Temptation’

The first and last irony about “The Last Temptation of Christ” is that it is certainly not guilty of blasphemy as charged, but that its honorable and admirable intentions are only intermittently achieved.

Any fair and reasonably objective eye must see that the Martin Scorsese-Paul Schrader film is devout, intelligent, passionate and concerned. The attempt, it is clear enough, was not to mock or trivialize the central events of Christianity but to rescue them from the sentimental shrouds of myth and the pastel-colored pietistic lithographs that surround them, and to understand better what it might really have been like to be there, 2,000 years ago.

The attempt, unfortunately, was probably foredoomed--in part by the awful literalness of the screen. Historical dramas require even more heartfelt suspension of disbelief than most dramas.

Now is not then, here is not there, and the actor playing Winston Churchill is not Churchill nor is the actress Eleanor Roosevelt nor are they F.D.R., Andrew Jackson, Gable, Lombard or George Washington.

With help from Henry Fonda and Raymond Massey, we may get a better notion of what Lincoln young or old was like. But to attempt to portray what Time calls “the most influential life that was ever lived” was the most daunting challenge of all.

It is a further irony about “Last Temptation” that Willem Dafoe looks as much as any portrayer yet has like the palely, gently handsome, compassionate Western European Christ of popular churchly art. Dafoe could have posed for the painting of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane that hangs on many a Christian wall.

The cast performs with skill and sincerity as Paul and John the Baptist, Peter and Mary and Mary Magdalene. It is just that it is impossible not to see them as actors acting.

The effect, more often than not, is of one of those summertime son et lumiere pageants at castles and battlefields. Schrader’s attempts to paraphrase the Gospels and to create other dialogue in a resolutely unpoetic and documentarian 20th-Century prose is counterproductive. It tends to defeat the reverberating overtones of mystery that these earthly events also have to carry.

Scorsese has said that the movie was “my way of trying to get closer to God.” And while his detractors argue that he could have done that as well on his knees in a church, it is not in the nature of film makers to go private.

And at its best and most moving, Scorsese’s film leaps across two millennia and creates an extraordinary sense of what Christ’s time was like: the heat, the desert, the oppression, the crowded and clangorous towns, the fishing boats on the Sea of Galilee, the dark Semitic faces (except, of course, bowing to artful tradition, Christ’s own). Centrally and sometimes compellingly, the movie conveys the inward anguish of a man set apart from other men by his troubled intimations of his own divinity.

What is certain is that no one who watches Christ’s walk to Golgotha through jeering mobs, or watches the Crucifixion itself in all its graphic and lacerating realism, is likely to feel the same again about the defining event of Christianity’s origins.

In those moments one sees exactly what Scorsese was about, and novelist Nikos Kazantzakis before him: to infuse new meaning and relevance into Christian faith by following Christ the man to the cross. For them this entailed not diminishing Christ’s divinity but examining and dramatizing his humanity.

The controversial temptation sequence itself may remind some filmgoers of the fine small art film, “Incident at Owl Creek,” from an Ambrose Bierce story. A whole escape sequence proves to have been a fantasy that took place in the flash between the hanging and the death of a Civil War soldier.

Christ’s fantasy on the cross of a different, earthly life of love, fatherhood--and, undeniably, adultery--is seen and rejected as a Satanic temptation. The rejection, not the imagined sin, is the point. Like the film as a whole, it is a reaffirmation rather than a compromising of the founding tenet of Christian faith, that Christ died for man’s sins.

Scorsese must be bemused, to say the least of it, by the presumption that he has tried to undercut that faith. All he has done is go against the cozy, shallow platitudinous tradition of much religious performance art.

(As a child, with the attention span of a cricket, I was lugged by maiden aunts to a high school in Hornell, N.Y., to watch a performance by a road company of the Oberammergau Passion Play. I remember only the interminableness of it, the hardness of the seats and, as scant consolation, the ingenuity with which the body was lowered from the cross by a series of cloth slings. On the whole I prefer Scorsese’s flawed but always dynamic telling.)

In a time when faith often seems either absolutist and unquestioning or nonexistent, Scorsese appears to have tried to widen a middle ground of rational belief. His enemy was not theology but aesthetics.

Yet it is proved again that there is nothing like being banned in Boston to pep up the trade for a film. So far as I know they don’t ban in Boston any more, but the organized protests have provided a word of mouth that “Last Temptation” might otherwise have lacked. And, its flaws notwithstanding, those who see it may well be glad they didn’t resist “Temptation.”